Response to Intervention

I heard about this (what do you call it? Process? Program?) A couple years ago and was pretty fascinated by the concept. Before I go any further, let me not assume that my only readers are my three excellent group mates. If you are unfamiliar with RtI, then read this summary from Wikipedia which does a fair job of explaining the program. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Response_to_intervention
There, got it? Of course. Now I could have made RtI my entire Blog topic and not come close to covering all the details so I’m certainly not going to attempt to cover everything today. I came across this blog http://ldblog.com/tag/rti/ which really got me thinking and I figured it was a perfect way to end my two week examination of the writing process with respect to learning disabilities and technology.
RtI is not something that has had any effect on me as of yet. After all, students who attend my school have all been identified (if they weren’t yet identified, they wouldn’t be there—it’s a school for only students with LD). I figure in the future we may see “treatment resistors”—those who do not respond to intervention. To this point however, I’m not even certain this is happening in the public schools in my area.
When I first heard about RtI the first initial concern I had was “what about students with LD that are not reading disabilities?” and this concern is noted by Blogger “JohnL” in his posting. This concern is also echoed in my experiences for the last two weeks in searching for writing programs. Finding information to blog about reading disabilities and accommodations was quite easy. There is a tremendous amount of support for struggling readers and that’s not a bad thing. After all, not being able to read can be extremely debilitating, especially for adults. It can negatively impact one’s entire life from career to family to health and finances. But what about writing? There is a severe lack of solid support materials for struggling writers and I don’t mean students who reverse letters, or misspell words. I don’t even mean those with bad handwriting. I mean those students with severe expressive language disorder, those who simply cannot express themselves with language—oral or written. Is this not a tremendous problem too?
The blogger says in his posting that we should not expect learning disabilities to disappear as some may have you believe is possible with RtI and I agree. How can we expect learning disabilities to disappear when we don’t even address all of the problems? Writing/ Written expression is not addressed with RtI and neither is Math which accounts for approximately 25% of learning problems (according to the blog). JohnL (blogger) states at the end that “there is much more to special education than the methods for determining eligibility of students with Learning Disabilities” and he couldn’t be more right. Let’s not put all our eggs in the reading basket and ignore struggling writers. RtI is a good start but not if it leads people to the false belief that it is a cure-all for LD.
So where am I going from here? Well I’ve exhausted the searching for writing programs so in my mind I’m working on ways I can do this on my own. I’ll let you all in on a little secret. I don’t think I want to be a teacher forever, eventually someday I want to write textbooks (who knows, maybe they won’t be in book form by that point) but regardless, I feel like I’ve found a goal for myself—find a solution to this writing problem and create a program that actually works for students. So having exhausted the writing and having addressed reading, next week I plan to move on to the subject of Math disabilities and what forms of technology can do to aid those struggling with dyscalculia. I hope I don’t find the shortage of support for Math disabilities as I found for writing. Then, if all goes well I will look to tie all the loose ends together. Maybe even address LD and social skills. That’s the rough plan but I’m letting the blog dictate my direction.